Vietnam's most ambitious agricultural initiative is rewriting what it means to grow rice - and one company is at the center of it all.
In the flatlands of the Mekong Delta, where canals thread between emerald paddy fields and the air is thick with the smell of damp soil, something quietly historic is underway. Vietnam is executing what may be the world's largest deliberate transformation of a single crop system - a government-backed push to bring 1 million hectares of rice farmland under low-emission, high-quality cultivation by 2030. Leading that charge, more visibly than any other private actor, is Loc Troi Group: a 30-year-old agricultural conglomerate from An Giang Province that has staked its future on the proposition that green rice is not a niche - it is the future of the industry.
Loc Troi Group was not born a sustainability enterprise. Founded in 1993 as An Giang Plant Protection Services Company, it spent its early years selling agrochemicals - fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides - to the smallholder farmers of the Mekong Delta. After privatization in 2004, it steadily expanded, adding rice processing, seed development, and logistics to its business. By 2010, Loc Troi had become one of the largest agricultural service corporations in Vietnam, with over 3,500 staff and links to more than 300,000 farm households. Its Hat Ngoc Troi rice brand has been recognized as a Vietnamese National Brand for five consecutive periods, from 2016 through 2024.
The company's turn toward sustainability was gradual but deliberate. In 2015, Loc Troi joined the Sustainable Rice Platform, a global initiative promoting resource efficiency and climate resilience in rice supply chains. By 2020, it had achieved a perfect score of 100 on SRP certification - a distinction it held for four consecutive years and one that no other company worldwide has matched. Its rice varieties have won awards at international competitions: Loc Troi 28, a cross between its signature Loc Troi 1 and the Indian Basmati, was crowned best rice in the world at the 5th Continental Rice Traders Conference in China in 2018, and again at the Vietnamese Rice Festival in 2022.
Huynh Van Thon, who serves as Chairman of the Board, has described the company's mission as a commitment to farmers: improving their livelihoods, reducing their costs, and building their capacity to serve increasingly demanding international markets. That framing shaped how Loc Troi responded when the Vietnamese government announced, in November 2023, one of the most ambitious agricultural decrees in the country's history.
Vietnam's "Sustainable Development of One Million Hectares of High-Quality, Low-Emission Rice" project was launched by Prime Minister decree in late 2023, targeting the Mekong Delta's sprawling rice belt - a region that contributes 90% of the country's rice exports and is home to around 18 million people whose livelihoods depend on the crop. The initiative formally extends across 12 Mekong Delta provinces, including An Giang, Kien Giang, Dong Thap, Can Tho, and Soc Trang.
The project's goals are stacked. It aims to reduce production costs by roughly 20%, improve farmer incomes by more than $600 million annually, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 10 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030. Vietnam's rice sector is responsible for about 50% of the country's agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and rice cultivation overall accounts for roughly 15% of the nation's total anthropogenic emissions. Rice paddies, when kept continuously flooded - the traditional cultivation method - create oxygen-depleted anaerobic conditions in the soil that allow methane-producing bacteria to thrive. Methane is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas, warming the atmosphere at least 28 times more effectively than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period.
The project's technical centerpiece is a package of practices called "1 Must, 5 Reductions" - one mandatory measure (use of certified seeds) combined with five reductions: seeds sown, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, water use, and postharvest losses. Central to the water reduction target is the technique of Alternate Wetting and Drying, or AWD, in which fields are periodically drained rather than kept permanently submerged. Research by the International Rice Research Institute has shown that AWD can cut methane emissions from paddy fields by up to 48%, while reducing water consumption by approximately 30%, without compromising yields.
When the initiative launched, Loc Troi was already operating at scale in the delta's sustainable rice networks. The company had begun piloting AWD with select farmer partners as early as 2022, deploying agricultural drones for fertilizer application - a method that reduces chemical overspray, lowers labor costs, and cuts the nitrogen oxide emissions that result from excess fertilizer. Under AWD, farmer Vo Van Van's fields in Long An Province are no longer permanently flooded. His fields are drained periodically, reducing methane output from his soil while delivering yields that are competitive with or better than traditional methods. After harvest, Van no longer burns his rice straw - a practice that had generated significant air pollution across the delta. Instead, Loc Troi collects the residue for sale to companies that process it into livestock feed and straw mushrooms, completing a circular chain that adds revenue and removes emissions.
Across 11 pilot models evaluated in 2025, results were measurable. Fertilizer use fell by an average of 31.3% compared to conventional farming. Pesticide applications dropped one to three times. Seed sowing rates fell significantly, and 100% of pilot models involved full straw collection from the fields. Average yields reached 8.5 tons per hectare in some models - approximately one ton per hectare above control plots. Estimated profits from one pilot cooperative in Tay Ninh Province reached 32.77 million Vietnamese dong per hectare, an increase of over 10.5 million dong compared to traditional farming. Farmer incomes across the project increased by an average of 13.4% in 2024 data.
The overall scale has outpaced expectations. The project initially targeted 180,000 hectares for its 2024-2025 implementation phase. By the end of 2025, more than 354,000 hectares - nearly double that target - had been brought under certified sustainable production. Loc Troi alone recorded a production area of 256,000 hectares in 2024, the largest of any single enterprise in Vietnam, a figure recognized as a national record. Its network spans 1,129 cooperatives and cooperative groups, with more than 600 having signed formal consumption linkage agreements with businesses.
Beyond improved yields and lower costs, the One Million Hectare Project opens a second source of income for Vietnamese rice farmers that has not previously existed at meaningful scale: the sale of carbon credits.
Loc Troi's Huynh Van Thon has described the carbon potential with striking precision. He has estimated that the circular practices Loc Troi applies - reduced water use, drone fertilization, straw collection, and bio-fertilizer production - generate approximately 10 carbon credits per hectare per crop. Applied across the Mekong Delta as a whole, he has projected that the region could contribute nearly 50 million carbon credits annually. Loc Troi has committed to sharing all resulting carbon profits with the farmers who produce them.
The World Bank has committed approximately $350 million in financing to underpin the project's infrastructure and technology phase, and its Transformative Carbon Asset Facility has proposed a pilot of up to $40 million in results-based carbon financing - paying for verified emission reductions from the program at $10 per carbon credit. Vietnamese officials estimate this could deliver $100 million per year in carbon credit revenue to Mekong Delta farmers once the full million hectares is operational.
Japan's Green Carbon Inc. signed a memorandum of understanding with Loc Troi - which holds the only SRP 2023 certification in Vietnam - to develop AWD-based carbon credit projects covering up to 200,000 hectares in An Giang Province. That agreement went further still when Verra, the global voluntary carbon standard, accepted Green Carbon's An Giang paddy project as the first rice paddy project listed under its VM0051 methodology - a significant milestone that opens the door to international voluntary carbon markets.
Vietnam has already achieved a symbolic export milestone in this space. In June 2025, the country shipped 500 tons of certified low-emission rice to Japan - the first such export from any rice-producing country to that demanding market. By September 2025, further shipments of 160 tons had reached Australia. These are small volumes against Vietnam's total exports of 7.9 million tons in 2025, but their significance is in what they demonstrate: that a traceable, certified chain from field to market is now operational.
The initiative is not without friction. Huynh Van Thon has been unusually candid about where the model breaks down. At a Vietnam Rice Industry Association forum on December 31, 2025, he identified the banking sector as the missing link in the entire ecosystem. Under the current structure, financial institutions treat low-emission rice programs as lending recipients rather than as partners sharing in the risks and returns of the transition. The result, in his framing, is a paradox: capital is theoretically available, but farmers and cooperatives face high interest rates and limited practical access.
He argued that when banks become integrated participants in the rice value chain - with financing synchronized to mechanization timelines and seasonal production cycles at the cooperative level - capital flows naturally and risk is distributed appropriately. Without that integration, the entire program depends on continuous government subsidy and international grant funding to hold together.
Loc Troi itself has navigated its own institutional turbulence. Following the departure and subsequent investigation of its former CEO Nguyen Duy Thuan in 2024, the company confronted a period of financial loss and strategic disruption - including unpaid debts to farmers in An Giang Province and consecutive quarterly losses tied in part to the company's pivot away from its longtime Syngenta agrochemical partnership in 2021. The company's credibility with farmers, built over three decades of embedding agricultural technicians directly in communities, survived that period. But the episode underscores that even the most committed actor in this transition is operating in a fragile institutional environment.
There is also the market challenge. Vietnam's rice exports in 2025 fell to 7.9 million tons, down 13.1% in volume from 2024, as global rice prices softened following India's return to export markets. The Philippines, Vietnam's largest buyer, moved to limit rice imports in early 2026 to protect its own harvest season. These pressures are independent of the sustainability program, but they compress the margins that make green premiums meaningful. International markets - particularly the European Union, Japan, and South Korea - are paying 10% to 25% more for certified low-emission and fragrant rice varieties, but reaching those markets consistently requires traceable supply chains, certified cooperatives, and compliance systems that are still being built.
The ViRiCert tool, launched in November 2025 by the Vietnam Rice Industry Association in partnership with IRRI, is one attempt to address that traceability g…